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Significant Other and I both deal with people who live in California for our jobs, and both of us are getting pretty fucking fed up with constantly getting things late (I don’t mean as in “late in the evening”, I mean as in “missing deadlines”). Clearly if I live on the East coast, and I decide to start work at 8 a.m. my time, I don’t expect my co-workers on the West coast to be available at that time.

HOWEVER.

If we’ve been working on the same publication, with the same schedule, for 4 years, I do expect them to know what our deadlines are (both in their time zone and in mine) and that I need things WEDNESDAY MORNING EASTERN TIME. I mean, this shouldn’t be a fucking surprise by now. It’s been the same since we started publishing. If I don’t get things in the morning IN MY TIME ZONE, they don’t get laid out on time, and then our publication doesn’t go out on time. It’s not fucking rocket science.

So someone please explain to me how, if we’ve had the same deadlines in place for 4 years and the same people on both the East and West coasts working on said publication, I’m sitting here right now WITH NOTHING TO DO ON A WEDNESDAY MORNING. Which means I’m going to have to try and somehow create extra time later in the day to compensate. Breaking news: I can’t manipulate time. I can’t create extra hours from the wasted ones that occur when things don’t get to me on time. SO NOW EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE LATE.

But why did this happen? I sign off between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. Eastern time each night. That’s only 2 p.m. or 3 p.m. on the West coast. WHAT ARE THEY DOING WITH THAT TIME? Answer: not what they’re supposed to be doing.

The reason this is problematic is because it’s not like, if I sign into my e-mail Wednesday morning at 8 and don’t have the things I need yet from the West coast, I’m going to get them at 9 or 10 my time. If they’re not there when I sign in, I’m probably not getting them until at LEAST noon EAST COAST TIME, if not closer to 1 p.m. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. I’m sorry, but it is. That’s 4 HOURS I have to sit around waiting, and waiting, and waiting, because the assholes on the West coast, WHO SHOULD KNOW OUR DEADLINES BY NOW, didn’t want to bother doing what they had to do yesterday in their time zone. So they might come in at 9 a.m. THEIR TIME and think “Oh, there’s still plenty of time to get this stuff sent to The Anger Ball.” BUT THERE ISN’T, BECAUSE IN MY TIME ZONE IT’S ALREADY THE AFTERNOON.

Are time zones really that hard to comprehend? I’ve never found them that challenging. Breaking news: When it’s 2 p.m. where you live, it’s not 2 p.m. EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD. You especially need to be aware of this if you’re working with people in OTHER TIME ZONES, so your co-workers do not track you down and cause you bodily harm.

This rant has been brought to you by the Earth rotating both on its axis and around the sun, the letter “T”, and FUCKING COMMON SENSE.

Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were all suddenly experts at my job. I guess I’ll just step aside and let you all take over, seeing as you know so much about grammar now. Did it come to you in a dream? Because just earlier this week, some of you couldn’t write a parallel comparison to save your lives. It’s amazing how enlightenment can come on so quickly! I’m happy for you.

Except that you’re full of shit.

Love,
The Anger Ball

If I could, I would send this letter on fancy paper to some of my co-workers. Some of them think that just because they spent time in college helping edit their friends’ essays, they’re experts in the rules of grammar. Then, they write or edit a story and can’t seem to string a sentence together without changing the tense or making it otherwise incomprehensible. So I fix it, as is my job, and then have to deal with a thousand questions on why I changed something. I have to defend every fucking change I make, even though THIS IS MY JOB AND WHAT I WAS HIRED TO DO. But you know what? I’m not perfect. So when I need help, I ask my boss, who has much more experience than me. So it’s not like I just change these things on a whim: there is always a reason. The reason being that the writing fucking blows.

I just don’t understand when it became okay to question how someone else does their job AT EVERY TURN. And these people are not my bosses. Bosses are allowed to talk to you about the quality of your work or the reasoning behind what you chose to do. People who are on the same rung as you, even if their job is different, need to shut the hell up and keep to themselves. Breaking news: If you wanted my job, you should have applied for it when it was vacant. Instead, you have another job. And I’m not constantly harassing you about what YOU’RE doing. If you have any serious concerns, bring them up to my bosses, who can then talk to me about it.

Because in the end, many of my co-workers know shit all about what I do and just look like dumbasses when they then try to explain why they don’t agree with what I did. Oh, you don’t agree with universally accepted grammar rules? That’s not my fucking problem.

Not to mention that many of the people I work with seem to have terrible reading comprehension. I will send out a sheet of examples of a given grammar principle, to try and stop myself from having an aneurysm of rage every week when I have to make THE SAME FUCKING CORRECTIONS, and my co-workers suddenly become EXPERTS on this fucking topic, sending me e-mails about how they would word some of these examples differently. Often, their “better” examples destroy the grammar principle my original example was representing. OH YES, THAT’S SO MUCH BETTER NOW. THANKS FOR MISSING THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT.

It astounds me how this happens EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. Without fail. No matter the topic, or that I consulted my expert boss on it, or that the deadline already passed. I don’t pretend to know my co-workers’ jobs better than they do, so why is okay for them to fucking pretend they know mine better?

I know the examples in this rant are very job specific, but I’m sure this overall experience isn’t something I go through alone. I feel that in every job, there is at least ONE person who likes to think themselves an expert at everyone else’s job. Usually there is more than one. People don’t like to admit when they’re ignorant about something. But the fact is, we’re all mostly ignorant. Most of us will never be true experts in ANYTHING, and some of us might become experts in ONE thing. Even though this is the case, most people hate to admit when they don’t know something, and to counteract their feeling of inadequacy, they have to constantly correct people or offer their opinion on matters about which they know nothing. And after dealing with it for four years—years in which I have been IMPROVING AT WHAT I DO—I am at my fucking wit’s end. So this rant just had to go here, for the sake of my sanity. Which, I suppose, is really the reason this blog exists. To save my sanity.

Anyway, the day that I move on to a new job, I might just mail a variation of the letter I wrote out above. It sure would make me feel a hell of a lot better about all this bullshit.

What-if we lived in a-world where people knew-how-to use hyphens-correctly? Can you-imagine how fucking-wonderful-that-world-would be? I can-barely-contain-my-excitement-at-the-thought.

Okay, I think I killed too many brain cells doing that.

One of my pet peeves related to grammar is hyphen usage, or the complete general ignorance of how to use hyphens correctly. I give a certain amount of leeway when it comes to these things on the Internet. The Internet is universal, so you can’t expect everyone to know every nuance of every language. So if I see a poor, abused hyphen, I’ll just cringe and move on. Frankly, even though I’m a copy editor for a living, I HATE when people have to comment on someone’s blog or another comment correcting someone’s grammar or spelling. FUCKING LET IT GO. Breaking news: In a casual setting like the Internet, it’s a fruitless argument. Sure, some people are impossible to understand because of the grievous mistakes they make, but trust me, it’s better that way. And odds are they won’t appreciate your nitpicking and you won’t educate them or change their minds. It will just turn into a flame war. LET IT GO. I do, even though some mistakes I see are just laughable.

But when it comes to my job, or business e-mails, I cannot STAND misused hyphens. What did the hyphens ever do to these people? Why do they have to be tortured like this and randomly stuck between words where they don’t belong or left out when they’re needed? PLEASE BE GENTLE WITH THEM. THEY’RE JUST TINY BITS OF PUNCTUATION. THEY CANNOT DEFEND THEMSELVES.

Now, I will admit that the rules of hyphen use are some of the most ambiguous around. But by utilizing a dictionary and a style guide, you really cannot go wrong. Some words always have hyphens in them, such as jump-start. Some words will only have hyphens when they are jointly modifying another word, like slow-witted employee. The general rule is that they should be used to avoid confusion or ambiguity. Now that can mean different things for different people. But it’s still not a hard rule to follow. While I might find the term sea-surface temperature to be ambiguous and thus need a hyphen, others might think sans hyphen—sea surface temperature—is just fine. Its presence or absence is not bothersome there. I’m talking about examples like in my opening paragraph, where the hyphens are serving no purpose and are extraordinarily annoying. STOP HARASSING MY EYES WITH UNNECESSARY HYPHENS, ASSHOLES.

For-example, you never need-a hyphen in a sentence-like-this-one. Ugh, typing that made me nauseous. I mean…I feel like anyone with even a most BASIC grasp of the English language—and this means everyone for whom it is a first language—should see why that first sentence is just vile, and it’s all because people insist on abusing the poor hyphens. If you’re not sure if a hyphen is appropriate, USE A FUCKING DICTIONARY. Sometimes they do belong in odd places (like jump-start; most people write it as one word). And there are some times you NEVER need them. You should never use them on an adverb that ends in -ly. So “perfectly laid plan” does not ever need a hyphen. STEP BACK. I SEE YOU EYEING IT. PUT THE HYPHEN DOWN.

But a little research on this can take you a long way. Most people don’t give two shits about their communication skills to even care; hell, if people can’t be bothered to type “you” instead of “u” (barf), I guess I can’t expect them to care about hyphens. But, frankly, I’d rather they NOT BE USED than be overused in the way that they often are. It verges on a felony, the way they’re abused.

I won’t get into all the time/reasons/places to use or not use hyphens, because this isn’t a copy editing blog. I’m just saying, if you have even one brain cell left, please put it to work learning how to use hyphens.

And don’t Even get me Started on random Capitalization of words. ARGH. I have to go lie down before my brain explodes.

Anyone with Internet access or a television has probably heard about the recent rash of LGBTQ teens committing suicide as a result of intense bullying. A lot of you have probably also read opinion pieces on it, ranging from intelligent and enlightening to belligerent and idiotic. I’ve been keeping tabs on this issue, it being relative and important to me for various reasons, and now I want to add my two cents.

I think the title of this post sums it up nicely, but let’s just be clear: IF YOU’RE A BULLY, YOU’RE A FUCKING ASSHOLE.

I think we all can agree on that. But if that were true, then there wouldn’t be bullies. Because nobody likes to think of themselves as an asshole. However, as we all know, a lot of people are assholes. So there seems to be a disconnect, because if I say a statement like that, everyone would agree. Or if I say “NOBODY LIKES AN ASSHOLE”, everyone would agree. Yet that clearly isn’t true, because all these assholes appear to have friends and family. I bet the parents of some of the bullies that picked on those LGBTQ teens are assholes too, so they clearly found someone who likes them enough to have a little family of assholes with them.

So let’s clarify: If you pick on someone for being different than you in some way, you’re a bully and an asshole. You’re also a fucking idiot, because everyone is different from everyone else in at least one way (and usually more like one thousand ways). And instead of shunning people for being different, which as we’ve established is idiotic, we should be glad that even though there are 6 billion of us, we all manage to be our own person. But even ignoring the cheesy factor inherent in that statement, the point is that if you’re picking on someone for having different hair or eyes or skin or teeth or sexual orientation or religious belief….it’s you against the world, then, asshole, because every single person you encounter will be different in some way. So maybe instead of trying to get everyone to conform to your narrowminded idea of what is acceptable, you should just shut the fuck up and mind your own business.

Who someone sleeps with or what god(s) they worship (or don’t) is nobody’s fucking business, first off. And physical features are all unchangeable factors that nobody should have to feel bad about just because a bully wants them to. Really, the person who should feel bad is the fucking bully, for being an ignorant asshole, and I think society should do more toward making those people feel just as stupid as they really are. It’s not the responsibility of the victims to change something in order to conform or blend in (yes, I have seen this proposed on a handful of blogs); it’s the responsibility of society to let bullies know their behavior is unacceptable. Because frankly, what we don’t need in this world are more bigoted assholes. What we DO need are more people who are proud of who they are, including embracing any true idiosyncrasies. Trying to “blend in” or hide who you really are is NEVER the answer, no matter what asshole bullies think. They’re the ones who need a reality check.

So I’m just trying to make it clear that bullies are assholes. Pass the word around, please, so I don’t have to make house calls. Next time you see someone being a bully, tell them they’re a fucking asshole and to cut it out. Remind them that NOBODY LIKES ASSHOLES. If that doesn’t work, point them in my direction. I promise I’ll take care of it.

I know I spend a lot of time on my blog ranting about things that make it seem like I want conformity in society, but I want to state outright that that is untrue. My rage mostly comes from a general lack of decorum, respect and awareness. I do not want everyone to be like me (that would pretty much be hell, I think); I do not want everyone to dress the same or act the same. I think we can all be individuals and still respect one another, and that is the source of my rants on this blog. I do not want my rants to be misconstrued as an attempt to make people fit a certain criterion. They’re just my personal pet peeves, and a lot of times I exaggerate them for comedic effect. BULLYING IS NEVER ACCEPTABLE. Don’t be an asshole.

So I fully intended for last week to be my glorious blog return, but then work started kicking my ass again, basically sucking away all of my fucking free time.

I remember when work was work and it stayed at the office, and home was home and you got to do whatever the hell you wanted, and never did the two meet. And while working from home most the time is a pretty sweet deal, please believe me when I say it also has its drawbacks.

Pro: The cats sleep on my desk and otherwise add some levity to my day (when they aren’t pooing where they shouldn’t be, that is).
Con: I essentially am working ALL THE FUCKING TIME.

Pro: I don’t have to worry about looking busy when I have nothing to do.
Con: I essentially am working ALL THE FUCKING TIME.

All I’m saying is, I’d like my free time back, thanks. Or a raise. More money will make up for my sleep deprivation and general increased crankiness. I always said I could never create time to make up for the Space Crew’s idiocy, but it’s starting to feel like that’s what I’m doing.

So, anyway, bear with me if my posts are a bit scarce. I have no intentions of abandoning the blog, as I enjoy myself a good rant. Work is just seeping into every crevice of my life right now (even my blog, gah!). But someday I’ll reclaim my free time, and then my rants will resound off the walls of the Internet once again.

In the meantime, you’ll have to deal with my sporadic rants. I have some good ones saved up, though, so when I get a chance to really make a post, there’s some hilarity in store.

But right now I’m working, at the real job I get paid (not enough) to do.

Do you remember when people had to have a fucking talent of some kind to be considered a celebrity? Because I do, and I miss those days every fucking minute of my life.

I’m sick of seeing “news” about all these “celebrities” and their “shenanigans.” And yes, I’m using the quotes correctly, because they are not celebrities and it is not news nor shenanigans. But what really gets me is that none of these assholes even has a fucking talent or skill. Most of them were on some stupid-ass “reality” TV show for .5 seconds and now for some reason their every move is considered worthy of a headline. Half of those assholes can’t even do drugs well, not to mention act or sing or whatever legitimate skill they pretend to have.

And I’m purposely not mentioning any of these people by name because I don’t want them to have the satisfaction of getting publicity and seeing my blog when they Google their own names. I’m sure you all can think of at least a dozen “celebrities” that fit this situation. Nowadays, some of these assholes weren’t even on TV at all in any way—some of them are just children of legitimately talented and famous people. I guess it works like royal blood did (or still does in some countries). You don’t need to have a skill or talent or even be particularly good-looking. If your parents are famous, you will be famous.

But you know what? I’m fucking sick to death of hearing all about these assholes. I miss the days when an actor or actress actually had to be talented in order to be in movies and make money. Or when a musician had to be able to sing or play an instrument (OR BOTH! CRAZY, I KNOW). Now, most people pay to see performers who LIPSYNCH at their concerts. Breaking news: That’s called karaoke, and you can do it yourself for a lot less money.

And what does it say about society in general that most of us are apparently obsessed with these assholes and their talent-less lives? I mean, I don’t give two shits, and in fact am extremely enraged by these fake celebrities (which should be obvious), but it seems a majority of people want to know every step these “celebrities” make. Even if it’s just going out to lunch. Breaking news: EVERYONE DOES THAT. WHY IS IT ON TV? It’s not a newsworthy event! But apparently enough people care that it gets these shows ratings, so of course they’re going to keep talking about all this inanity.

I just don’t fucking get it. I just want to know when actors I like are in a new movie, or when musicians I like are going to perform near me. I DON’T NEED TO KNOW WHERE THEY EAT LUNCH. I DO NOT CARE. And why the fuck does everyone else care? And even worse, why do they care about a “celebrity” who has no more talent than your anonymous next-door neighbor? Here’s some advice, free of charge because I’m nice like that: Stop trying to live vicariously through these assholes and live YOUR OWN FUCKING LIFE INSTEAD.

Or at the very least, if you are going to live vicariously through someone, at least pick someone with a fucking iota of talent. I know the idea of all these talentless assholes becoming “celebrities” really excites some people because the idea of being famous for doing nothing is appealing to lazy assholes, but I’m hoping this will come full circle and in a few years nobody will remember these “celebrities” and we can get back to people who are actually worthy of our attention for one reason or another.

The other reason it enrages me is because these people aren’t only famous, but they’re getting rich off this shit. These “celebrities” are literally being paid for NOTHING. They have no talent, and apparently that is worthy of millions of dollars. It’s fucking ridiculous.

…

You know what? I take it all back. Their talent is clearly tricking the rest of us into thinking they deserve all this money for doing nothing. But you know what? THEY AREN’T EVEN GOOD AT THAT. Because here I am, and there are other people like me, who see them for what they really are: a nobody.

So please, “celebrities,” please fade back into obscurity. It would be the greatest thing you could ever do. And hey, you might even be good at it (although I wouldn’t hold my breath)!

As I mentioned yesterday, I only have to commute into the office once a week, which is a pretty sweet deal.

But don’t think I don’t see plenty of stupid shit happen on that one day, especially on the train (not the subway, an actual train) to get from here to cesspool city. The cars of the train are set up so there are rows with two seats each on one side of the aisle, and rows with three seats each on the other side, just for reference.

When we get on the train at our stop, there are plenty of empty seats. Or so it seems. The problem is that even though 90% of the people on this train are adults and commuters, everyone apparently thinks everyone else has cooties and doesn’t want to sit next to someone. So the people sitting in the two-seat rows will put their bag on the empty seat and then pretend to fall asleep, and the people in the three-seat rows will sit one near the window and one near the aisle, leaving the middle seat open.

Look, assholes. This is a commuter train. It’s going to get full. But I’m not going to stand up because you think your bag deserves a seat and I don’t. Unless you paid for two fucking seats, put your bag on your lap. Are we back in third grade or some shit? I practically expect all the girls to be sitting in one car and all the boys in another, each giggling about how the other smells funny and is stupid. Get the fuck over it, okay? Breaking news: This isn’t your private train. On public transportation, you have to share space. So move your fucking bag.

And the people who leave that middle seat open in the three-seat rows: Who do you think you’re kidding? Oh, you were just trying to be polite and not crowd the other person. Fuck off and move over. Otherwise, I will wake you up and either climb over you or ask you to move over so I can sit down. Is that a seat for your fucking imaginary friend or something? Because if you’re this much of an asshole, you clearly don’t have any real friends. I don’t see why people can’t just slide in when they sit down the first time so that people getting on at later stops don’t have to feel awkward trying to get a seat.

I’m not lazy; I don’t mind standing. But I’m not going to stand when there are seats open. I’m especially not going to stand when someone’s purposely taking up two seats because they think they’re entitled to that extra space. I DO ask people to move their bags all the time, because you have to be an ULTIMATE asshole to be that inconsiderate, and instead of letting myself feel nervous or uncomfortable asking someone to move their stuff, I remind myself that they’re the ones taking up a seat they didn’t pay for. That’s unacceptable on an airplane, but it’s supposed to be OK on a train just because there are no assigned seats? Yeah, right.

I’ve had to sit next to plenty of smelly, creepy, weird people on public transportation. It’s just the way it goes. I just expected adults—and mostly working adults, mostly all in business attire—to behave less like children. My mistake, I guess. Good thing I got my cootie shot.